I am a dress and fashion historian, specialised in Renaissance and early modern matieral culture and consumer studies. I currently work as a Marie Curie Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen, where I develop my reserach and co-direct a reserach programme on early modern clothing (CCCC). I created this blog to offer the readers the possiblity to follow my new research on early modern fashion and textile trade in early modern Scandinavia. Hope you enjoy my blog!
My current project started in 2012, when I was awarded a two-year Marie Curie scholarship to start a new project on early modern Scandinavian fashion, clothing and textiles trade, to investigate how international trade and global cultural encounters changed Scandinavian cultures in the Renaissance period. In my research I am using a wide range of historial sources to explore what economic, social and stylistic changes were introduced by foreign imports in Scandinavian clothing cultures, how the lives of individuals were visually transformed by novel concepts, and, eventually, what constituted Scandinavian ‘fashions’ in the period (1550-1650). I am also developing new theoretical models for economic and social interpretation, in order to evaluate how my own work fits within and can contribute to the ongoing debates concerning economic, social and cultural change in Europe. In addition to producing historical knowlege with new interpretaiton, I am also developing new methods that combine my art historical training and previous experience of empirical evidence and theoretical models drawn from fashion theory, social and economic history and anthropology with the tradition of textile analysis and costume conservation. Therefore, my scholarship involves extensive training in technical analysis of textiles and museum work. I get to travel around Europe and the United States to learn about textiles in museums and workshops!
I am hoping that, by placing Sweden and Finland along the Baltic trade route on the ‘map’ of the early modern global encounters, previously overlooked in this kind of research, my research will not only open up new horizons for Nordic research, but it will also challenge the perceptions that social and cultural change in the 16th- and 17th-centuries was limited within the great European cultural and commercial centres such as London, Spain, Italy, and France.
My name is Paula Hohti and I can be contacted on paula.hohti@aalto.fi
This project is supported by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme «FP7-PEOPLE–2012-IEF, grant agreement number 329672, titled ‘Global encounters: Fashion, culture and foreign trade in Scandinavia, 1500-1650’.
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Websites:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/
http://ctr.hum.ku.dk/ http://cmc.chem.au.dk/about-cmc/danish-national-research-foundation/
http://natmus.dk/ http://www.ku.dk/english/
In addition to academic work, I am a passionate lover of food and cooking. In 2012, I was selected as one of the contestants of Masterhchef Finland and made it 8th.
If you are interested in my cooking, and want to try one of my Finnish recipes, see the brilliantly written column by Monique Truong in New York Times:
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/ravenous-fried-baltic-herring-at-home/?_r=0
Global Encounters 